HWD Daily

George Lucas, You Can Put Your Stuff Here

There are nine days left in the Barack Obama presidency and three days left of Oscar-nominations voting, and one of these things is really stressing us out. Hello from Los Angeles, where we’re talking about a new George Lucas museum, a Coen Brothers TV show, and the soft sensuality of Joseph Fiennes’s Michael Jackson performance.

FINALLY, A HUT FOR HIS JABBA

After years of looking, George Lucas has finally settled on a home for his planned $1 billion Museum of Narrative Arts: Los Angeles’s Exposition Park, a public-transit-friendly museum hub near Lucas’s alma mater, the University of Southern California, which beat out a potential site in the San Francisco Bay Area and an earlier option in Chicago.

VF.com’s Yohana Destadetails Lucas’s personal collection, which includes “models of X-wings and the Millennium Falcon, early storyboard drafts of A New Hope, and costume designs from a variety of Star Wars films. There will also be fine art by Norman Rockwell, Edgar Degas, and more.”

By Mike Windle/Getty Images.

For years the Star Wars director has been in the curious position of trying to give away his collection and pay for the massive building to house it, while issues like Chicago mayoral politics, San Francisco zoning laws, and art-world snobbery seemed to doom the endeavor. The Los Angeles Times’sDeborah Vankinreports that in L.A., Lucas obtained crucial local backing from Los Angeles County Museum of Art director Michael Govan, Academy Museum of Motion Pictures leader Kerry Brougher, and former DreamWorks Animation C.E.O. Jeffrey Katzenberg, all of whom gathered at an L.A. County Board of Supervisors meeting in November to show their support for the project.

Groundbreaking in L.A. is planned before year’s end, a spokesman told Vankin, with the opening targeted for 2021.

THE TUBE ABIDES

The Coen Brothers have become the latest prestige filmmakers to try their hands at television, according to a scoop from Variety’s Justin Kroll. Picking up on a genre they ably tackled with True Grit and No Country for Old Men, the duo will write and direct a limited-series western from their original idea, called The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, for the new TV production unit of Megan Ellison’s Annapurna. Intriguingly, Kroll writes, “Sources tell Variety that Annapurna intends to pursue an innovative approach that could combine television and theatrical.”

SHREK’S NEW BOSS

Longtime Warner Bros. executive Chris DeFaria is heading over to run DreamWorks Animation, according to a story broken by The Hollywood Reporter’s Borys Kit. DeFaria was part of the team that created the Warner Animation Group, which made the surprise success The Lego Movie in 2014, and he has overseen the visual effects for Warner’s live-action features, a key job at any studio. At D.W.A., which Comcast’s NBCUniversal bought for $3.87 billion last April, DeFaria will report to Universal Pictures chairman Donna Langley, and will face some interesting managerial challenges. DeFaria will work to fill the giant void Katzenberg left when he stepped down as C.E.O. last year, and to figure out just how DreamWorks Animation fits in at Universal, which already has an animation hit maker in Chris Meledandri’s Illumination Entertainment. Kit’s story hints at some issues yet to be untangled: “While Universal Filmed Entertainment Group chairmen Jeff Shell has said he’d like Meledandri to oversee creative efforts at both animation units, Meledandri currently is maintaining his focus on Illumination. Having working closely with Langley since the acquisition of D.W.A., Meledandri will serve as a special advisor to D.W.A., the studio said.”

Got that, filmmakers? Double the exec notes!

TRAILER OF THE DAY: URBAN MYTHS

Joseph Fiennes plays a 2001-era Michael Jackson in Urban Myths, a comedy series debuting in the U.K. on January 19 that follows Jackson on a post-9/11 road trip he took with Elizabeth Taylor (Stockard Channing) and Marlon Brando (Brian Cox). Cries of whitewashing arose when the project’s casting was first announced, and the new trailer, which includes Fiennes in full Jackson makeup and wardrobe, has only stoked them. The Guardian’s Hannah Ellis-Petersen has an interview with director Ben Palmer defending the casting choice. “We were really looking for the performance that could unlock the spirit, and we really think Joe Fiennes has done that,” Palmer said in the interview. “He’s given a really sweet, nuanced, characterful performance.”

That’s the news on an overcast day in LA. What are you seeing out there? Send tips, comments, and a TAP card to rebecca_keegan@condenast.com. Follow me on Twitter @thatrebecca.